LBSC 708T/INFM 718T: Transformational Information Technologies
Spring 2007, Thursdays, 6-8:45 P.M.
Instructor:
Doug Oard
Credit Hours:
3
Prerequisites:
INFM or MLS core complete or admission to a Ph.D. program. Required
core courses must be completed by the end of the immediatey preceding
Winter term. There are 4 MLS core courses and 3 INFM core courses;
prior completion of INFM 620 or the management requirement (LBSC 630
or INFM 612) is not required.
Short Description:
Seminar on Transformational Information Technologies; Nature of
innovation, frameworks for analyzing the effects of information
technology innovation on individuals and society, application to
historical and emerging information technologies.
Longer Description:
The times in which we live are seeing the greatest sustained rate of
change in technology in all of human history. We need to learn how to
think about this tectonic shift and its effect on individuals and
society as a whole. This course will explore the ways in which
information technologies evolve, and how technologies interact with
social systems. We will build a framework for thinking about the
effects of technological change on social systems. We’ll start by
looking at what people know about how to think about innovation. Then
we’ll work through a series of case studies, starting with those
rooted most deeply in the past -- where we can learn a lot about what
actually happened -- and moving towards those rooted most deeply in
our vision of the future – where we can explore the utility of the
framework(s) for thinking about disruptive innovation that we develop
over the course of the semester.
Goals:
- Understand the nature of innovation
- Develop analytical frameworks for thinking about the process by
which innovations occur, become adopted, and influence future
opportunities
- Learn to identify opportunities and risks
Topics:
Example list of topics (actual topic selection after week 8 will
depend on student interests, but will be similarly fundamental
transformational technologies):
- Toffler's "third wave", Kuhn's "paradigm shifts"
- Christensen's "disruptive technology", Burke's "connections"
- Storage (writing to optical disks)
- Postal service (Roman roads to FedEx)
- Telecommunication (telegraph to cell phones)
- Computing (abacus to embedded computing)
- Internet (Arpanet to blogs)
- Search (ancient libraries to ???)
- Encryption (invisible ink to ???)
- Translation (human translation to ???)
- Speech processing (isolated digits to ???)
- Digital archives (OAIS to ???)
- Data mining
- E-commerce (B2C, B2B)
Learning Methods:
- Seed the discussion with historians, futurists, and others
studying innovation
- All students will work in one of two teams, alternating
responsibilities for leading the class discussion between the two
teams and rotating the team member roles between narrator, research
director, researcher, and presenter over the course of the semester.
Each team will have two weeks to prep for their session (from the
conclusion of the previous session that they led). The narrator will
lead the preparation effort with the assistance of the research
director, and the narrator and research director will be expected to
meet with the instructor twice during that period to help guide their
preparation.
- One reading assigned each week for the "off" team to read
(decided one week in advance by the "on" team's narrator).
- Each group provides background, describes evolution, and updates
framework
- Occasional subject matter expert visitors (plus CLIS faculty and
post-candidacy doctoral students welcome any time -- if they do that
week's assigned reading!)
- Individual term papers (any focus: large or small, backward or forward)
Grading:
- Team contributions: 40%
- Term paper: 40%
- Other contributions (discussions, email reflections, framework
updates, ...): 20%
Readings:
Some possible sources for initial readings:
- Pew
Internet Survey on the Future of the Internet
- James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed, London Writers, 1985.
- Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovators Dilemma, Harvard Business
School, 1997
- Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd
edition, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Toffler, The Third Wave, Bantam, 1984.
Examples of readings on specific technologies (actual selections will
be made by the teams leading each discussion, and the topic list will
be designed collaboratively with the students after week 8 so example
readings are not identified beyond that point.):
- Week 3 (Storage): Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin and David Gerard,
The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800.
- Week 4 (Postal Service): William L. Garrison, “Innovation and
Transportation’s Technologies,” Journal of Advanced Transportation,
34(1)31-63, 2000.
- Week 5 (Telecommunication): Anton A. Huurdeman, The Worldwide
History of Telecommunications, Wiley-IEEE Press, 2003.
- Week 6 (Computing): The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the
Revolution that Made Computing Personal, Viking, 2001.
- Week 7 (Internet): Katie Haffner and Matther Lyon, Where Wizards
Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, Touchstone, 1996.
- Week 8 (Search): David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, The Google Story,
Random House, 2005.
Some other examples of the types of things we will read:
- Adams, R. MCC. (Fall 1997). Social contexts of technology. Social
Research. 64(3), 947-964.
- Dosi, G. (1982). Technological paradigms and technological
trajectories: A suggested interpretation of the determinants of
technological change. Research policy, 11, 147-162.
- Earl, M.J. (2004). Piloting socio-technical innovation. In K. Viborg
(Ed.), The past and future of information systems. Oxford. Elsevier
Butterworth-Heinemann.
- Lopez-Martinez, R. & Piccaluga, A. (2000). Knowledge flows in national
systems of innovation: A comparative analysis of sociotechnical
constituencies in Europe and Latin America. (New horizons in the
economics of innovation series). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar
- MacKenzie, D. & Wajcman, J. (1985). The social shaping of technology:
How the refrigerator got its hum. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University
Press.
- Winston, B. (1998). Media technology and society, a history: From the
telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge.
Last Update: October 11, 2006